Singh grew up in Frederick County along the border with Carroll County and spent a great deal of her childhood visiting family in Westminster. She spoke at both the Westminster and Union Bridge Memorial Day parades this year about her experiences with the guard as the new assistant adjutant general, the first female and the first African-American to hold the position.

The Times caught up with Singh to talk about her first year of commanding Maryland's National Guard troops, her goals for the future and her community involvement.

Q: What was your childhood like growing up in the Carroll and Frederick county area?

A: I lived with my grandparents from the time that I was an infant until I was 9 and lived with a lot of my aunts and uncles around. There was a very close-knit family environment, which was great, because a lot of the older aunts and uncles lived in the Westminster area, so that's where I would come to visit. […] I moved with my parents when I was about nine and — actually it was on my ninth birthday when I moved with my parents — and I did not adjust well. I'm not going to say that everything was bad, it just didn't work. As a result of some issues and challenges, I ended up leaving home at age 16 and from that point I went to Frederick and continued to try to go to school and work and I ended up having to quit school because I just couldn't do both. I just didn't have the support to be able to do both. I probably could have made some other choices. I probably could have talked to some other folks, but I felt like I was doing everybody a favor just dealing with it myself.

Q: You joined the Army National Guard at 17. Would you describe that as a turning point for you?

A: In 1981 I joined the guard — it was actually June of '81 that I joined — and I went away to basic training in October of '81. That gave me a chance to get out and to see that there are other things that I could do. […] It gave me a different perspective on who I am as an individual and I ended up being gone all the way until about the spring of the next year, so it was April or May of the next year by the time I got back. And at that point some other things had happened in my life. I got pregnant with my oldest daughter and so I was not only joining the military and starting off kind of fresh and new, I [then] ended up getting married and being pregnant with my oldest daughter. So that was definitely a turning point for many different reasons. Being a young mother is not what I would have necessarily chosen. It happened that way and I'm not disappointed that it happened because — obviously joining the military put me in a different [mindset] — being a mom, you forget about worrying about you so much and you get a chance to worry about somebody.

Q: How long did it take you to gain enough perspective to see how monumental this decision to join the Army National Guard was?

A: I don't think that I really understood or really had even thought about how much of a turning point the guard was for me until a good 15 or 20 years later. I mean, it's really recently here where I've been talking about my career that I've really thought about what it meant for me to sign up that day. What really drove me to that? Why did I do it? Because I hadn't put much thought into it until the last 10 years or so. And I've got to say that deployment has done that for me. Being deployed, you think about all kinds of things. You get a chance to kind of think about things that have happened in your life in retrospect, so I think that it gives you a chance to really take a step back and I think that's when I really started thinking about what wearing this uniform has meant to me.

Q: Why has it been important to you to share your story and your journey that got you to the National Guard at 17 and to this point?

A: I think what has gotten me to really be open is that, being a senior leader, I always wanted to be very transparent. I think that being in Afghanistan, when I was there, and seeing what the people there go through, seeing what the kids go through, I realized that my life was — even though it wasn't perfect — it was much better than what they could ever hope for, at least in this day and age. And so, when I looked at that, I had a lot to be thankful for, and I also knew that the choices that I made were choices that I made. I made a decision to go into the military. I made a decision to get married and have my daughter very young. I made a decision to, unfortunately, get divorced and to be a single parent for a good period of time. And so those are choices that I made that have defined and shaped me in one way or another and I also realized that there are so many other people out there that are just like me. I hate to say it, but I'm not anything special, when I look at all these other folks. I think that we all have challenges and I think that the more honest we can be about how we've gone through things and overcome them, then the younger people can see that things are not so easy and when things get really, really tough, another person has made it. And I don't think we share enough of those stories with our young leaders to help guide them.

Q: What kind of challenges have you faced in your first year? Are there additional challenges being the first female and the first African-American in this position?

A: I just push it to the side. What I think it does say is that I look at the workforce very differently. I look at it from the perspective of I want to have a diverse population of folks. I want the senior leadership to look like the soldier base. I want to have diverse leaders that have diverse backgrounds that have diverse thinking, because I don't want them to be all like me. And I want to be able to give opportunity to individuals who really haven't gotten a chance or that someone didn't look at because they were not part of the clique. The thing that I have done the most, I think, is to tear down some of the barriers in thinking and the way that we have done business in the past and to challenge some of that and to challenge my leaders to think differently. We're starting to reap the rewards of that. […] We're starting to move the dial in the right direction because we're focused in on good, stellar leadership.

Q: What are the other goals that you had heading into this position?

A: One of my additional goals was to really put the Maryland Army [National] Guard on the map in terms of our capabilities. And when I say on the map, I want people thinking about the Maryland Army National Guard and thinking a professional military force that also has professional civilians. I want them to look at us and think we are the best of the best. My key things that I came out with for all of my troops, and I can read off my top five in a short, condensed version. The first one is asking them to be agile and transparent and also setting the high standards. The second piece is that we have to be very focused on recruiting and training the best. The next piece is that we have to be very efficient and accurate with our administration and how we manage our business internally. The next area is that I challenged my leaders to be creative. I wanted them to continue to push demanding training and I wanted them to also be realistic, because we're coming into times when we have less resources so we have to be realistic. The last piece that I asked them to really focus on is being logistically strong. Making sure that we have all of our logistics — that's the money, the equipment, that's all of the pieces that go with that — we have to be logistically strong to be able enable the other pieces. Those were my top five.

Q: What kind of opportunities do you have to work in the community and what are your priorities there?

A: The one thing that we are doing now is really getting out in our communities and really being visible in our communities. This next year I'm going to be challenging them to really start looking at how do we build better relationships with the civilian organizations here in the area and other government agencies. We've got to build those partnerships because we're going to need them and so we're looking at doing what I'm considering a public-private knowledge exchange partnership. We're going to be looking at some other organizations that we can get involved with as leaders in our communities. One that I haven't been very involved with that we're going to be possibly looking at is the Boys and Girls Clubs and how we can be more out front and leading within our communities. We've done a number of things within the schools, we're always out in the various schools, but I've tried to use my platform to be as visible as I can to kind of promote what it means to be a civilian soldier.

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